Home owners and renters have many options when it comes to furnishing and decorating their homes or apartments. Home owners may add design elements such as furniture, paint, flooring, lighting, decorations, and/or the like to their homes to enhance the look of their home and make the home unique to the home owner. Furthermore, there are many options for each of these design elements. For example, a coffee table may come in many different sizes, shapes, colors, with accessories, with drawers, etc. There are so many options that there are retails stores solely dedicated to design elements. Furthermore, selecting and positioning these design elements can be a difficult task for most home owners. In fact, many home owners turn to professional interior designers to design rooms of their home.
Many factors may play a role in interior design. For example, a home owner's background, likes/dislikes, dimensions of a room, location of the home, and the like all play a role in which design elements a person selects for their home. Even with advances in technology, knowing the design that the home owner may like the best may be a challenging task, even for the home owner.
Today, modern handheld mobile devices, such as smart phones or the like, have the capability to facilitate payment for a cup of coffee or provide a boarding pass for a flight. These advances combine multiple technologies through a handheld mobile device to provide a user with an array of capabilities. For example, many smart phones are equipped with significant processing power, sophisticated multi-tasking operating systems, and high-bandwidth Internet connection capabilities. Moreover, such mobile devices often have additional features that are becoming increasingly more common and standardized features. Such features include, but are not limited to, location-determining devices, such as Global Positioning System (GPS) devices; compasses sensor devices, such as accelerometers; and high-resolution video cameras.
As the capabilities of such mobile devices have increased, so too have the applications (i.e., software) that can be used with mobile devices. One such example of innovative software is a category known as augmented reality (“AR”), or more generally referred to as mediated reality. One such example of an AR presentment application platform is Layar, available from Layar, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The Layar platform technology analyzes location data, compass direction data, and the like in combination with information related to the objects, locations or the like in the video stream to create browse-able “hot-spots” or “tags” that are superimposed on the mobile device display, resulting in an experience described as “reality browsing”.